He seems to believe this is an important distinction, but I’m not convinced yet. Rather, I think the essence of (complex) event/stream processing lies in its performance for certain kinds of data processing problems, some of which require super-low-latency and some of which don’t.

Maybe there’s some kind of a partition of the problem space, in which if you want event IDs you’re better off with an Apama-like rules-engine paradigm, while if you don’t need them you do better with Coral8/Streambase-style SQL. But off the top of my head, I don’t see it.